Wicked problems and assessment in engineering education: Developing and evaluating an analytic rubric

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Previous research indicates that engineering education does not adequately prepare students to address complex, ill-structured, real-world problems, such as wicked problems (WPs), and that one reason for this may be a lack of robust assessment instruments. In recent years, assessment rubrics have been developed and evaluated for a variety of learning outcomes, but no rigorously tested rubric has yet been developed for assessing engineering students’ ability to integratively address WPs. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by introducing an analytic rubric for assessing engineering students’ written responses to WPs and evaluating its reliability, validity, and utility. The results suggest that the rubric can support reliable and valid assessment if raters are carefully trained. The utility of the rubric for formative assessment and teacher professional development was most prominent.